Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Fire Emblem Series's Wyvern Riders

Considering that I'm The RPGenius and that Fire Emblem is an RPG series of over 10 titles' length, I've had surprisingly little experience with the series. Many years ago, I played the fan-translated FE4, and last year I checked out FE7 and FE9. This year I've played the remake of FE1, but that still equates to less than half of the series I've gotten to, and unlike the Shin Megami Tensei games, which I only discovered about 3 years ago, I've known about Fire Emblem for close to a decade. Dunno why this is; they seem fairly decent so far. At any rate, it is thus that I say, before diving into this rant, that I know comparatively little about the series as a whole, and perhaps this issue IS addressed at some point, and I'm just out of the loop...although I somewhat doubt that whatever explanation there might have been made for it would stand up to much scrutiny. Nonetheless, here is my issue of the 10-day-periodical-rant-period:

Why the bloody devil do the Fire Emblem Wyvern Riders never use the damn dragons they're sitting on for offense?

Think about this. The Wyvern Rider, AKA Dracoknight unit in a Fire Emblem game is basically a person holding a spear and riding on the back of a wyvern, a special kind of dragon. They're very handy units due to being able to fly over obstacles, much like the Pegasus Knight units in the game. Unlike the Pegasus Knights, however, these are people who are riding a freaking DRAGON. You know--the mythical beast coated with thick scales, equipped with terrible razor-sharp iron claws, and armed to the teeth with teeth? Very sharp ones? Exactly why is it that the Wyvern Rider only takes advantage of the creature's back and wings, and not the rest of the wyvern's assets? I mean, sure, the spear is a powerful, versatile, and far-reaching weapon, and hey, all power to the dragon-riding grunt that wants to skewer enemies with it. But wouldn't it be a far more effective strategy to add to the spear's poking powers a huge, fang-filled maw powered by impossibly strong jaws? Because it IS sorta, y'know, RIGHT THERE.

I mean, it's not like with the Pegasus Knights in the games. I think it'd be a pretty useful and sensible thing to have the pegasus take advantage of being gifted with flight and hooves, and kick enemies as it swoops in for the rider's sword or spear attack. But I'm not really going to argue about that, because horses are not usually all that bloodthirsty a species, and one could reasonably assume that just adding wings to them wouldn't change that. Training a pegasus steed to join in the battle and make its own attacks wouldn't be any more feasible than training a regular ridden horse to do so, and to my knowledge, even war horses were never trained in such a way.

But a wyvern? The concept of biting something really hard to make it die is not exactly a foreign idea to a member of the dragon family. If it were, their mouths would look a little less like a nightmarish killing machine. You don't have to work especially hard to convince a wyvern to attack anything threatening in front of it. The behavior and tools are already there. The only issue might be training the vicious scaled death-maker to STOP doing so at some point, and we know that one's no problem, since apparently the Wyvern Riders have managed to get the monsters not to attack anything at all.

I dunno. I'm sure I'm just nitpicking again, but it seems inefficient, not to mention silly, to have a creature designed specifically to attack and kill anything it wants with impunity, to take it into battle, and then use it as little more than a flying chair.

17 comments:

Maybe the developers didn't know how to have it make sense with their battle system (sword> axe> spear> sword) without rebalancing the whole thing. Even if there was an animation or piece of text showing/telling the wyvern did something, they would have to re-design parts of the battle system to both show it as more than a spear attack and still not the 'WIN!BUTTON!' that something like Ultima in Final Fantasy 6 Advance is (especially when your magic attack is high enough to make every magic def/eva-ignoring cast of it hit enemies 5 x 9999-damage with it all for 6 MP with the aid of the Quick spell for double uninterupted actions and the relics that allow for dual-casting and making all spells cost 1 MP all on a single character). Like you said, it's a nitpick, but one that might take a lot of work to become satisfying.

I've played FE1, 4, 7, and 9. Worth thinking about...well, the ones I've played are decent RPGs, nothing wrong with them, but no, there's not really much about them that demands significant contemplation.

On the topic of FE, where do both of you fall on regarding the game that signifies Atlus's potential fall from grace (FExSMT, not Persona 4 Dancing All Night)? Cuatious to buy it because of the supposed fan service, excited for the game, unsure or somewhere in between those options?

Honestly, I really don't know what to make of combining Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei. I really don't. They don't seem like they could possibly mix into something good. Not because either is bad, of course, but just because the overall styles, the approaches, the intents of each series are so vastly different. It seems like trying to combine Fallout with Star Ocean, or Mass Effect with Grandia. Bizarre. Why not put SMT together with, I dunno, Castlevania, or Shadow Hearts, or maybe Parasite Eve? They seem like better fits. On the other hand, I would have said the same about putting Disney together with Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts is overall pretty darned good. So who can say?

I'm not as cautious about the fanservice as you might think. Obviously it concerns me, but, well, Atlus HAS shown that it possesses the right touch for SMT in a lighter, less oppressively serious environment, as proven by SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha 2. On the other hand, it also has gone too far with that in the original SMTDSRK1, and it let itself get detrimentally distracted with fanservice more than once with SMT Persona. So I'm a little cautious, but optimistic on that regard--I think it could do it well. And it's working with Nintendo, and if any company out there knows how to employ game crossover fanservice in an enjoyable way, it's...well, actually, it's Nippon Ichi, but Nintendo's a pretty close second.

So yeah, overall, I guess I look to FExSMT with mild interest, but the whole idea is just so strange to me that I couldn't possibly hold any expectations one way or another about it. It'll be neat if it works out, but I don't think I'll be enraged if it doesn't.

I think the series' main themes (war for FE and morality for SMT) would mesh well together (having various options in a war and presenting options for the player to choose what they believe is the lesser of two evils).

Some of the staff like the director for SMTxFE worked on Der Langrisser and that had a sort-of similar premise to what I described (the game branched near the start depending whether you chose to attain peace attempting to get people to understand each other, which isn't likely to occur, or by forcing people to follow the nation's army, which might be considered oppression rather than "true peace"). That game lacked anything meaningful and was kind of infamous for fanservice-y character designs, though (with most of the team's other works being kind of similar so it's odd that Atlus decided to purchase that company at all).

Witcher 3 looks like it could be neat and has a lot of effort put into it, but I kind of wish they'd spend their resources better. I'm pretty sure CD Projekt Red hired a botanist just to focus on where specific types of vegetation grow (and build locations for the sake of being realistic). It seems like a waste of resources to work that hard on something that most people wouldn't really notice.

Well, a huge level of detail to the setting can just mean a high level of love and investment by the creators, which is never a bad thing for all the rest of the game--you care that much about the little details of your lore, then you'll care even more on the stuff that really matters. On the other hand, I've seen games like Rune Factory 1, where ALL the effort was spent on unimportant details like that and everything that would give those things purpose was all but ignored. So it can go both ways. Still, The Witcher 1 and 2 were high quality work, so I'm sure it's the former scenario.

Not...sure what that has to do with the rant at hand, but no, certainly not. I think it's clear from my Annual Summaries that the majority of RPGs I play are older ones, and we all must live responsibly within our means.

Even without attacking directly, which could critically compromise their effectiveness as a mount, a wyvern mount in itself would probably have a huge psychological effect on the enemy. I know I wouldn't want to see an enemy soldier and his homies swooping in on a bunch of mini Bahamuts while The Ride of the Valkyries turns up. This may be the concept behind the Quick Burn skill which gives them a major Hit/Avoid bonus immediately at the start of the fight that gradually declines, and FE8's Pierce skill on Wyvern Knights that occasionally causes enemy Def to drop to 0.

But as strict gameplay goes, we don't *see* the wyvern attacking, but it may be reflected in the Rider's superior Strength and Defense compared to a Pegasus rider.